The communication or transport of video content, such as transmitting movies over the Internet, is growing in popularity. Whether being transported over the Internet or from a more direct access line, such as from a local cable company, the video content quality can be affected by packet loss. Packet loss can be caused by a number of factors, including signal degradation over the network medium, oversaturated network links, corrupted packets rejected in-transit, faulty networking hardware, maligned system drivers or network applications, or normal routing routines. Quality assessment of the delivered video content has been done based on metrics such as packet loss rate. However, such metrics do not necessarily correlate with a user's viewing experience.
To maintain quality, a sender of video content can retransmit lost packets. However, the amount of re-transmission affects the overall throughput of the connection. For a network experiencing a significant amount of packet loss, the re-transmission of lost packets of a video content can significantly reduce the throughput for the transport of the video content.